BY CLAYTON PATTERSON | In 1998 when Captain Cooper of the Seventh Precinct was asked about the explosion of quality-of-life types of crime in my area of the Lower East Side, Houston to Delancey St., he stated we were now living in an Entertainment Zone. Who thought up the Entertainment Zone idea? Who was behind read more here »

BY CLAYTON PATTERSON | On March 7 a representative each from Councilmember Margaret Chin’s office and the Cooper Square Committee visited Taylor Mead. They arrived around noon and stayed for about 15 minutes. Taylor lives on the top floor at 163 Ludlow St. I am not sure if they checked the door to the roof. read more here »

It was an early summer morning in 1996, and hundreds of police were getting ready to flood onto E. 13th St. between Avenues A and B, above, to evict squatters from several tenements. “We were welded into a building on the north side of 13th St.,” Clayton Patterson recalled of this photo’s vantage point. “Bratton read more here »

BY CLAYTON PATTERSON | It’s one thing to be anti-gentrification and against the corporate development that is destroying the fabric of the community and plowing under the elements that make a neighborhood, and another thing to be engaged in helping to save what is left of the community. If we don’t support our local family- and read more here »

BY CLAYTON PATTERSON | The Lower East Side used to be a place that sheltered, developed and nurtured great political leaders. These were politicians whose ideas changed the world and made a difference to the huddled masses, the new immigrants and the poor, even giving a hand up to the dissidents — those questioning read more here »

Ed Koch appeared in the movie “Captured,” a biopic on Lower East Side documentarian Clayton Patterson, and he attended its New York premiere in June 2008 at a Rooftop Films screening atop New Design High School on Grand St. on the Lower East Side. The rock band A.R.E. Weapons also played at the screening, which read more here »

BY CLAYTON PATTERSON | I have documented this community for many years and have witnessed the changes. I was one of the well-known, anti-gentrification radicals, considered by the gentrifies to be a part of the so-called rabble, branded one of the troublemakers, arrested several times, banned from the Seventh Precinct Community Council for asking questions read more here »

BY CLAYTON PATTERSON | The old Lower East Side produced a long list of creative individuals whose output and contributions were instrumental in altering the consciousness of America and the world, in so many fields: music, art, poetry, writing, theater, film, photography and video, political thought, religious philosophy and on and on. If I had read more here »

BY CLAYTON PATTERSON | My goal with these photos is to give some positive exposure to those hard-working people who make our life easier, but whose existence is given hardly more notice than a passing shadow. As someone who grew up at the bad end of the working class, I have never lost my love read more here »